Never Coming Home (32 page)

‘He didn’t.’ Kaz’s voice was very soft. ‘Until I had something that he wanted and I wouldn’t give it to him.’

Abruptly Devlin felt the tension leach out of Kaz. She moulded into his side. ‘We have to go to the château.’

‘It’s a place to start,’ Devlin agreed.

‘Darling, do you really think
 
…’

‘Yes, Mum. I do need to see him. If I can. And Devlin will take care of me.’

He felt the shock go through her body at the same time as the finger prodded into his heart. Confidence. She trusted him to take care of her. Mouth had got there before her brain. And he wasn’t giving her the chance to back out.

‘I’ll look after your daughter.’ He hauled himself to his feet, bringing Kaz with him, and held out his hand, cast and all. Suzanne rose and took it. Now it was a done deal. A mother/daughter/lover triangle. Kaz couldn’t go back on her admission, because now he’d promised her mother. Worked for him

They stood for a moment. Devlin looked from one drawn, beautiful face to the other, drinking them in.

Two women, protecting the reputation of a murdering bastard who didn’t deserve it. And now the whole thing was unravelling. This was on his shoulders now, and he wasn’t about to put it down.

Chapter Forty-Four

Kaz stood at the long window, staring down. The tops of the trees were moving in a hot, dry wind. They were bigger. Seventeen years bigger. She could barely see the ruined tower that was all that was left of the original building on the site.

Oliver had never changed the locks. Suzanne’s ornate key, to the even more ornate front door, had turned easily. She almost hadn’t brought it, but Suzanne had pressed it on her. ‘Just in case.’

It had been clear, even as they approached the building, that it was uninhabited. A walk through silent spaces had confirmed it.

She turned abruptly. The room behind her was empty, bare walls, bare floorboards. Darker patches showed on the walls and floor, where paintings and rugs had been removed. She shivered, remembering cold. In the winter the place had been icy. There had never been much furniture, but what there had been was gone. Even Eleanor of Aquitaine’s monstrous bed. Wherever Oliver was, he wasn’t here.

Kaz ran her finger along the wall. The wallpaper, faded blue with a strange silver sheen, was coming away, showing patches of plaster underneath. This suite of rooms faced north. They felt damp, even in the summer heat. Tall and echoing. She’d expected that to be a trick of childhood memory, making them seem bigger than they were. The height swallowed everything, warmth and sound. She’d lived here for three years of her childhood, in this place of half-furnished rooms and endless corridors.

She stood still and shut her eyes. Scent came first. Patchouli and joss and other things she’d been too young to recognise, and under it a heady, pervasive smell of linseed oil. From Oliver’s studio, at the top of the building. She teetered on the edge of memory. There had always been that sense of things happening in other rooms, snatches of loud music and conversation, laughter behind closed doors.

You never belonged here.

She’d been a child in an adult world. She’d probably seen and heard things that she shouldn’t have, though she didn’t remember now. And over and behind it all was Oliver. The man who could make lines and splashes of colour sing, who could catch a bird on paper with a few quick strokes, who’d tried to teach her.

He’d offered her all he could. His art, the closest thing he had to love.

Failure tasted bitter in her mouth. She could still remember those breathless evenings, when her father had sat with her on the terrace, drawing endlessly in those cheap exercise books, trying to will her to see what he could see. She’d treasured those times. The scent of cigarettes and oil, which always clung to him, and the quick movements of paint-stained hands. But it had always been about the drawing, the siren call of the paint, when what she’d really wanted was to walk with him in the garden and the woods. To look at butterflies and lizards and the colour of the old roses, climbing over half-ruined walls.

Her father had always been there and always been just out of reach.

‘Kaz?’

She turned. Devlin was standing in the doorway. Light from the corridor silhouetted him. Big, solid and awkward in the plaster cast.
There
.

She didn’t have to ask him to take care of her when she needed it. He just did it. Why hadn’t she known that?

Her blunder the other night, in her mother’s sitting room, that she’d covered up by completely ignoring, had been the
 
truth. Devlin would take care of her. It wasn’t a matter of her being clinging, or needy. It was Devlin. He was taking care of her now, concern in his face. It was the easiest thing in the world to step into his arms.

‘What?’ He pulled her into his chest, holding her in place as he stroked her hair. She was trembling. She hadn’t noticed. And her legs would barely hold her, but it didn’t matter.

‘I thought he loved me, because
I
loved him. Or tried to.’ Her voice sounded thin, swallowed by the room. ‘I wanted him to be proud of me, to notice me. I never understood.’

Devlin’s face, above her, seemed to be distorted, misty at the edges. Her eyes were swimming with tears. ‘He didn’t see
me
at all. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good enough. He had nothing to
give
that a small girl could use. We barely breathed the same air. It was all about the painting. The groupies and the parties and the busted hotel rooms, those were only trappings. He couldn’t love me, because he didn’t have room. If I couldn’t share what obsessed him, there wasn’t any space for anything else. It ate him, from the inside. Everything he did, he did because of his art.’

She took a small, hitching breath. ‘All the capacity to love that he had, he gave to my mother, and that wasn’t much. But she was part of the painting. His muse. He has no morals, no scruples, no conscience. He never has had them. He isn’t like other people. Genius walks past all the rules. Why did I never see it?’

Realisation lifted her voice. Now she could say it out loud. ‘I don’t have to try any more. I’m never going to get his attention, but it doesn’t matter. What
I
am has nothing to do with him.’

Pain was bubbling up and out, freeing her, making her feel light-headed. ‘And because he doesn’t care about anyone else, that bastard stole my daughter.’ It came out as a wail.

Then the dam broke. She gave up trying to contain the tears and burrowed into Devlin’s chest, sobbing.

Chapter Forty-Five

He didn’t really know how he should handle this, but the hair stroking thing seemed to be working, so he went with that. Kaz was making the front of his shirt wet. He’d never in his life had a woman cry in his arms, until Katarina Elmore. This made twice now. His mind shied away from an early morning in a hospital car park. That had been
 
…

This time it felt
 
… incredibly good. Not that Kaz was crying, but that she was letting him hold her while she did it. A tiny, hope-shaped spark, had lit, very gingerly, in his chest. It was in unfamiliar territory and it knew it. If Kaz
 
…

Shit. Not the time, not the place. Not the man?

‘Better now?’ When she got to the hiccupping and rubbing her nose stage he eased back, brushing hair out of her face.

‘Mmm. Sorry.’ She was scrubbing the damp patch on his shirt. Now
that
was starting another response entirely. Huh!

He covered her hand. Would it be too much to bring it to his lips? He decided regretfully that it was. Guaranteed to bring the shutters down. He studied her face. No shutters. She wasn’t blocking him out. Her nose was a bit red and there was a trace of pink across her cheekbones, but that was all. Devlin had a sudden desire to kiss her until she was pink all over, and then get her naked, just to make sure. It sounded like a plan.
Later.

‘There’s nothing here.’ His voice was raspier than he expected. Not enough blood to the vocal cords. She was shaking her head slowly. ‘Doesn’t look like it. There’s just
one more place.’ She stepped away from him, to lead the way.

The staircase was behind a door. From the outside it looked like the entrance to another room or a closet. Narrow, dark-varnished treads rose steeply.

‘Oliver’s studio,’ he queried.

‘Closest he could get to the sky, and away from the rest of the house.’

Kaz went first. Devlin tried not to be distracted by the rear view as she climbed. The space stretched the entire expanse of one side of the building. Huge skylights let in a steady northern light. The floor was scarred and stained with paint splotches. The smell of linseed still hung heavy in the air. One wall was defaced by a wide blue stain. Whatever had made the mark it had hit the bricks hard.

‘That’s it.’ Devlin detected a tiny tremor in Kaz’s voice. ‘Very few people ever came up here, but it was still the heart of the house. If there’s nothing
here
, then Oliver is gone.’ She was turning slowly, surveying the walls as if they might have a message.

‘We can ask in the village. Moving furniture would have taken a while and more than one truck. Someone might have seen something.’

‘Mmm.’ She turned to look at him. ‘The locals hated it when Oliver bought this place.’ She turned away again, back to the room.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes.’ She sounded surprised. ‘He used to let me sit up here with him, while he worked. Over there.’ She nodded towards the corner. ‘There was a dais and I’d make myself a nest with the old draperies. I used to organise jars of pigment and acrylics into groups of colour. I didn’t remember. He hated people to be up here when he was working but I could come and go as I pleased.’ She took a long look round. Devlin waited. ‘Some of my best memories of this place are up here.’ There was wonder in her voice. ‘Nothing here now. Shall we go down?’

Kaz closed the door at the bottom of the stairs and leaned against it. She stood for moment, then held out her hand. Devlin threaded his fingers through hers and they made their way down through the quiet building.

‘There must be an agent or someone, taking care of the place, and keeping control of the garden.’ Kaz looked round thoughtfully. The floor and stairs showed signs of recent sweeping. ‘If we find out who, they might know something.’

They’d reached the ground floor and the main hall. Devlin stooped to lift the handset of a phone, pushed into a corner. He listened, then put it back. ‘Still connected. When Jeff rang, someone answered. But not the person he needed.’

‘They must have told him the place was empty.’ Kaz gave a small shiver. She swivelled slowly, considering. ‘We looked at the kitchen. We can’t get into the wine cellar, where Oliver kept his paintings, because of the steel door. I doubt if there’s anything left there, anyway.’ Her gaze came back to Devlin. ‘There’s nothing much else to see, unless you want to look at the grounds. I used to ride my bike along there.’ She nodded to a wide corridor, stepping forward. ‘Through the hall and out on to the terrace – there’s a door – oh!’

Devlin moved fast, to push her behind him. The door was open and a man stood in the frame, with a naked blade in his hand.

Chapter Forty-Six

The scythe was old, and stained with rust. The hand that held it was twisted and spotted. And shaking visibly.

‘
Arrêtez!
’ He might be old and scared, but it wasn’t stopping him advancing down the corridor, brandishing his weapon of choice. ‘
Qui êtes vous? Ne bougez pas
.’

Kaz wasn’t listening to the commands to stay still. She stepped forward eagerly, right into the man’s path. ‘Maurice! You’re still here.’

‘Mademoiselle Katarina?’ The scythe clanged as it dropped to the floor. Devlin moved forward smartly to pick it up and store it on a convenient window ledge. He leaned against a wall and watched as Kaz was petted and stroked and marvelled at. Her wild curls were remembered and her beauty exclaimed at, until she was blushing. Devlin loved that look.

‘
Votre mari?
’ The old man was looking him over now, bright-eyed, like a cock on his dunghill.

Kaz’s cheekbones had gone even deeper pink. ‘
Non. Un ami
.’ She introduced Devlin. Handshakes were exchanged. ‘Maurice was the first person to teach me about plants. I used to follow him all over the garden.’

Devlin waited again while Maurice exclaimed over the success of his protégé. ‘I read about you, in the magazines, and now, on the internet. Jean finds things for me. But you are not here to talk about the plants and flowers,’ Maurice suggested at last.

Kaz shook her head. ‘We’re looking for my father.’

If Maurice thought that this was strange he didn’t show it. He spread his hands. It was a totally Gallic gesture. ‘Alas. Gone.’

‘Do you know where?’

The old man shook his head. ‘The lorries, they came at night. Three, not local men.’ Devlin sensed that he might have spit but was too respectful of his surroundings. ‘In the morning. Poof, all gone.’ His head bobbed up and down ‘Who knows where?’ he demanded dramatically.